Digital Overload Among Digital Natives?
Topic: Personal Blogs
I had dinner with a couple of digital natives a couple of nights ago. The topic of MySpace came up in the conversation. Both said they have pages there, as do all of their friends. I asked them why they used MySpace and they told me that it was a great way to stay in touch with friends from high school and college. They also told me that they really had no interest in meeting new people there, that keeping up with people they actually knew was time consuming enough. Both agreed that they only listed people they actually know in their list of friends.

They also said that they thought that MySpace is getting too big. "In fact," one told me, "A lot of my friends are now changing their profiles to say they're 14 years old." Why? Apparently this automatically makes their profiles private, preventing messages from uninvited people. Another example of digital overload?



Tag: MySpace

An interesting approach to setting blogging policy
Topic: Personal Blogs
The Everett blog incident and other similar situations have been on my mind the last couple of days, so I read James Snell's post Blogging@IBM with great interest.

IBM's corporate communications and legal teams invited members of the company's blogging community to join them in working collaboratively (using a wiki) to develop corporate blogging policies and guidelines.

Schools and districts could use these as a springboard for discussion about blogging. The policy and guidelines are included in the link above.

Personal ≠ Private
Topic: Personal Blogs
Will Richardson posted a comment on his blog today about a recent incident in Everett, WA related to a teacher's personal blog. Apparently, the teacher chaperoned the prom, was distressed about the way some of the female students were dressed, and used terms such as 'slut' and 'hooker' to describe the students' attire. One thing led to another, and the blog posting was reported by a local television station. This led to the teacher removing the post and publicly apologizing to the unnamed female students. While it's not possible to read the original post, the flurry of comments posted in response to the public apology are accessible.

Most administrators I know fervently hope this kind of situation won't occur on their watch. It gets blown out of proportion, takes hours and hours of precious time for damage control, and could have been avoided altogether. I agree that it was irresponsible of the television station to treat this as being something even remotely newsworthy. However, I think there's another point that needs to be addressed.

Personal blogs or Web pages are not private. Think about it. What is the purpose of setting up a blog? It's to enable a wide audience to read what's been written, right? Then why are people surprised when someone actually does read what's been written?

Administrators, teachers, and students all need to think about what they post. While I completely understand how this teacher felt about the way the students were dressed, my mom taught me there are things you may think, but you don't necessarily say them or put them in print--especially in an environment where literally anyone in the world with an Internet connection and the time to do it can read it!

Update on Workshop
Topic: Personal Blogs
Well, the workshop was yesterday. Interest is high, people registered to set up their blogs. Someone did ask about finding personal interest blogs. Thanks to Tim's comment last week, I suggested starting with blog directories on a free blog host.

Now comes the real work. One district person has volunteered to do some blogging with the principals on issues they need to be working through anyway. They said they were game, and that I could lurk. I'd love to see them take off with this.

Workshop blogs
Topic: Personal Blogs
On Tuesday I will be having a group of administrators set up their own blogs. We'll be using them that day as they work on developing personal vision statements for technology use at their sites. Before starting, they'll have an opportunity to review several existing school, classroom, and administrators blogs.

Knowing that the average blog lifespan is 2 months, and also that there are thousands of blogs out there with just one or two entries and nothing more, I'm wondering how to hook them into continuing to use the blog. I realize that they need a compelling reason to continue. It helps that we're doing this based upon their request to try it out.

How do other PD providers entice workshop participants to stick with it? All ideas welcome!

Blogs for Reflective Practice
Topic: Personal Blogs
My experiments with having participants blog responses to questions posed during workshops seem to be working well. Tomorrow I'm going to take the next step and ask a group of principals who have never blogged before to create personal blogs to use a tools for reflection during the winter and spring.

This is a group I've worked with previously. Their skill range is quite broad. Last year we used an e-mail list to stay in touch between workshops. I'm curious to see how they will respond to this environment. I think I've planned for most contingencies. It'll be interesting to see what happens. I may have them use my workshop blog to post responses to the initial workshop activity as well...

Another Principal Blogs!
Topic: Personal Blogs
Will Richardson highlighted this blog on Weblogg-ed and I wanted to share it here as well. The Coe School's Principal's Page is another example of a principal using a blog to communicate with the school community.

Back to Blogging
Topic: Personal Blogs
Well, I understand now how people get distracted and put their blogs on the back burner. My daughter's wedding was last weekend, and it's been tough to devote much attention to anything else. So, I've relied on posting the weekly education-related blogs from Sandy and haven't done much else.

I have deided to try blogging during an inservice with principals, however. It's coming up in early December. It's a brainstorming activity and I want to capture their ideas. I was originally thinking about using Inspiration, but that means one person needs to record while people talk. This way, everyone will be able to record his/her own ideas at one time and we'll then have them collected in one spot where everyone can review them. It will also model how easy it is to post an entry.

Blogging Principals
Topic: Personal Blogs
I was talking with someone about using a blog with a group of principals for a workshop. I asked her if she knew of examples of blogging principals- you guessed it! She named those folks who have been mentioned here already- Tim, in particular. It would be great to find some additional examples.

Practical Ideas for Principals
Topic: Personal Blogs
I've read other blogs today until my eyes crossed! It seems that there are several trains of thought about what makes a blog useful. I started getting caught up in the notion that blogs need to be more than an automation of something you'd do anyway and then brought myself up short. I was thinking about John's comments about principals' time (or lack of it) and started wondering what's wrong with automation?

For example, I remember trying to get teachers to contribute items for a staff meeting agenda or helping my office manager gather up and sort out the scraps of paper that had weekly or daily staff bulletin notices. It might have been much easier if we had set up blogs for these tasks. If every staff member was subscribed to the blog and received notices through RSS, s/he could contribute items online and read other postings as well. Then the items would have been in one place and we all would have saved time.

What are some other mundane tasks that could automated?